Friday, August 12, 2005

OK, we can bring the troops home now...

The government said yesterday that it favored allowing North Korea to have a peaceful nuclear energy program, opening a yawning policy gulf between South Korea and the United States.

"Our position is that North Korea has a general right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes such as for agriculture, hospitals, and electricity-generating," Chung Dong-young, Seoul's unification minister and National Security Council chairman, said in an interview with online news site Daum Media. "We have a different view to the United States."

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Our position might be different due to the North Koreans' insistence that they are going to use any nuclear program they have to make weapons out of them. However, far be it from me to suggest that we take a position that puts us as odds with the perspectives of 2 neighbors, neither of whom share a border with us. Since South Korea believes that it is secure enough to be unconcerned about the North's nuclear ambitions, I think it's pretty clear that they don't need several tens of thousands of American troops patrolling their border with North Korea. I would propose that we bring the majority of those troops home and, since they're already used to the mission, have them start patrolling our borders here. Our Border Patrol has been seriously undermanned for years and the constant refrain from them is that they don't have the manpower necessary to secure our borders. I believe that and I think we have the resources to do something about it. I think I read somewhere that the Border Patrol has less than 2000 agents on the southern border between us and Mexico. If we took just 10,000 soldiers from South Korea and put them to work securing America's borders as they have South Korea's, that act alone would more than triple the available manpower along the borders and that's assuming we split those 10,000 two ways. Bring home 20,000 troops and you can put 10,000 more bodies on each of our borders. Regular patrols in that kind of force will most definitely reduce the flow of illegal aliens penetrating our borders, and no one's got a problem with that, do they?